Nice Legs: Musings on Dreams and Visions

Sometimes I drive around the city and it just hits me. This world is broken. It shouldn't be this way. She shouldn't be selling sampaguita at 2am. That kid shouldn't be sniffing that stuff. That annoying driver shouldn't be such a jerk. And I shouldn't be judging him.

Don't get me wrong, the world and all the people in it have many great qualities and beautiful attributes. But we exist as "glorious ruins", to borrow the words of Brennan Manning. God intended for things to be better, but our selfish designs ruined us. In the beginning, the Creator worked His wonders and made all we know, crowning it with man and woman. It was perfect. But man and woman trashed creation with sin, and that was the atomic explosion that changed everything. Perfection violated is quite grave. When an expensive dress is stained; it's far worse than if an undershirt is stained. The more precious the thing violated, the more serious the matter. You can imagine how serious it was when God's perfect masterpiece of love was defiled. It was so gravely terrible, that we still see the effects today. The world was broken then, and is currently in need of repair.

That's where dreams and visions come in. Dreams and visions are a God-given solution to the world's broken state.

Michaelangelo once said, "I saw the angel in the marble, and I carved until I set him free." This is a great illustration of dreams and visions. Seeing the angel was the dream; laboring to set him free was vision at work. A dream is abstract. A vision is more tangible. Vision is a dream with legs. It makes the life of a dream more exciting by directing it to a purpose, and setting it into motion. A vision is a directed dream that you're actually doing something about. Thus, to have vision is to know the ideal -- the dream -- and actually do something to make it real.

All throughout the history of mankind, the people who have made their mark were those who had dreams and visions. I love to think about Abraham and how God told him to look to the heavens and try to count the stars. He gave Abraham a huge dream, that God would make of him a great nation as numerous as the stars or the sand. And what made it significant was that Abraham's dream was directly tied into God's dream to save the world through Jesus. I think the whole of Scripture is a story of a dream and a vision becoming reality. God's broken masterpiece is being rebuilt, with Christ as the Hero of the story.

And here's the cool bit. We're in on it, too. We're like sidekicks or something.

The Church is God's vehicle for the rebuilding of the dream. We are His visioneers.We are His legs. It sounds funny, being God's legs, right? But we are! And people of true vision are more than just selfish dreamers, obsessed with acquiring cool stuff in this life. The purest sense of vision, the most potent world-changing personal vision, is the one that identifies most closely with God's vision. That's what made the patriarchs, the prophets and all those surreal visionary saints more than just hallucinating freaks. They were visionaries who saw God's dream for the world and dedicated their lives to making it a reality.

So here's my prayer for everyone: may we be dreamers. And more importantly, may we be people of vision.